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Reducing Livability: How Sustainability Planning Threatens the American Dream

In response to state laws and federal incentives, cities and
metropolitan areas across the country are engaged in
“sustainability planning” aimed at reducing greenhouse
gas emissions. In many if not most cases, this planning seeks to
reshape urban areas to reduce the amount of driving people do. In
general, this means increasing urban population densities and in
particular replacing low-density neighborhoods in transit corridors
with dense, mixed-use developments. Such planning tramples on
property rights and personal preferences. To increase urban area
densities, planners use containment policies such as urban-growth
boundaries or greenbelts.

Owners of land outside these boundaries are restricted from
developing their land. Inside the boundaries, housing prices rise,
making homeownership in general, and single-family homes in
particular, unaffordable to large numbers of people.

Surveys show that people of all age groups aspire to own and
live in a single-family home with a yard. Yet planners in Portland,
San Francisco, and other urban areas seek to reduce the share of
households living in single-family homes to well below 50 percent.
They are doing this by restricting the construction of
single-family homes while subsidizing multifamily housing. To make
matters worse, these policies are simply not effective at reducing
green house gas emissions. Plan Bay Area, a plan recently approved
for the nine-county San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose metropolitan
area, proposes to spend $14 billion in subsidies for high density
housing and $5 billion in subsidies for rail transit. Yet the
combined effect of these subsidies will be to reduce the region’s
green house gas emissions by less than 2 percent, at a cost of
nearly $1,200 per ton of abated emissions. By contrast, a separate
“climate initiative” program for the region includes
projects such as car sharing, van pooling, and incentives for
people to buy more fuel-efficient cars. It is expected to reduce
the region’s emissions by nearly 3 percent, at a cost of just $22
per ton of abated emissions. Planners are undiscouraged by the
wastefulness of their density-and-transit programs.

Laws passed in California, Florida, Oregon, and Washington
require cities to implement such programs no matter how costly, and
the Obama administration is offering cities in other states grants
to encourage them to write such plans as well. These plans should
be abandoned because they intrude on property rights and personal
housing preferences and are cost-ineffective at saving energy and
reducing emissions.